Nandi Hills, Kenya · ~2,000m
A high-altitude single estate handcrafting orthodox tea — including the purple leaf grown commercially almost nowhere else on earth.
The farm
Kenya is the world's largest exporter of black tea — and almost all of it leaves as CTC dust, sold by the kilo at the Mombasa auction. Tumoi sits apart from that. High in the Nandi Hills, at around two thousand metres, it's a single estate that handcrafts whole-leaf orthodox tea: black, green, white and oolong.
And the purple. A naturally purple-leaf cultivar, bred for these highlands and grown at scale almost nowhere else, it gives us a tea no one at your table will have tried — soft, floral, faintly otherworldly. One relationship, and it gives us both our Hero and our Surprise.
Altitude is the quiet hero here. Slower-growing leaf at 2,000m concentrates flavour, and the orthodox method keeps it intact all the way to the cup — instead of grinding it into something anonymous on the way to auction.
What we buy from Tumoi
Our flagship orthodox black, and the purple tea that makes people stop mid-sip. Both from the same hillside, the same hands.
Every pack of their tea sends
20%
of what you pay straight back to the estate. Not a donation — their share.